Your parents were your age once, making dumb choices and figuring it out. Remember that when they’re figuring out you.
REFLECTION
WHAT THIS MEANS
The adults correcting you were sixteen themselves at some point, making decisions as badly as anybody that age, and they came out mostly fine. That cuts both ways and both ways are useful. Your current mistakes are not disqualifying, and their caution is partly built from remembering their own.
Ask one of them about something stupid they did at your age, in a friendly moment rather than during an argument. It shifts the dynamic for a while, and the answers are usually better than you expect.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
Which mistake of your parents’ youth might explain their worry?
MORE IN MEANING & PERSPECTIVE
- Being a regular somewhere, a diner, a court, a library, gives a town a place that knows your face.
- Out of eight billion people, nobody else can show up for your people exactly the way you do.
- You’re living on a planet that’s moving around the sun at about thirty kilometers a second. You can handle a Monday.
Free, with nothing to buy inside it.